Search This Blog

Goals for CSUMB.EDU Rethink

A team of web professionals from Austin, Texas, visited campus this week, meeting with Web Services and University Communications in the initial "discovery" phase of the CSUMB.EDU Rethink project that will continue through June 30.

Four Kitchens is a web development firm who won a competitive bid to assist the university with an overhaul of our public and internal web presence.

Goals

We initially participated in a goals workshop that included throwing up ideas on post-it notes that were related to the university, our two departments and any personal goals we all have.

For the university, we broke down into these collections of ideas of improvement:

Conversions

Mobile

Reputation

Grow

Target Different Groups

Process Improvement

For departments, our collection of goals to improve upon were:

Simplify

Relationship

Editing

Share

Design

Communicate/promote

We then reduced our post-it notes in collections down to these five statements as project goals to work towards:

"Create a delightful, elegant and consistent experience across all devices."

"Create more meaningful interactions through better tools for all users."

"Create and promote relevant content to tell the university's story and provide a better level of service."

"Continue to exemplify transparency by sharing our challenges, breakthroughs and achievements with the broader CSUMB and world communities."

Pre-Mortem

We also did a workshop to undercover the issues we will address in the coming months, before they actually happen.

On the whiteboard, they wrote "Here lies CSUMB Rethink" and we began to put post-its up of failures. We ended up with these collections of notes:

change management

stakeholders

technical implementation

editing environment

migration of content

general feeling

workload issues (campus growth vs content)

resources

responsive (i.e. mobile)

This lead to a discussion of how we can avoid these pitfalls and what resources/people do we have on the team that can help reduce many of these points of failure.

User Feedback

We spend our lunches meeting with and gathering feedback from students, staff & faculty in the Dining Commons.

We also met with stakeholders from Student Affairs and Extended Education and will continue to use these kinds of groups to provide feedback along the way.

SMART Goals

We ended with a SMART goals workshop that helped us focus on the specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed goals for our project.

This was our toughest workshop, because it meant we really had to focus on things that weren't necessarily action items but things we'd like to have happen at certain times.

Many of these we couldn't finish in time and we'll work on in the next week, but they included testing, surveying, communicating (e.g. Twitter/blog), and completing key interfaces (e.g. prior to registration).

Switching the body text to a sans serif font increases legibility, which is a measure of how easy it is to distinguish one letter from another. Characters in a sans serif typeface don’t have the tails that serif typeface characters have, which adds space between characters making them easier to read.

Changing the header font to a wider sans serif typeface improves legibility because header characters are no longer compressed, which makes characters difficult to read. We also adjusted the font size of all headers to improve readability, which refers to how easy it is to read words, phrases, blocks of copy such as a book. With…

On Monday, May 22, 2017, Web Services will improve its editor used to create content in csumb.edu.

This will be the first significant improvement to the editor since we launched the last redesign in February 2015.

In addition, we will provide some significant updates to how we create and display key elements, including:Improving how events get made, shared across campus, and displayed on the page.Enabling the ability to "clip" content from one CSUMB site and used on another.Improving how news is displayed on a page.Introducing several new content blocks that will provide more functionality.
Test the new editor
You can test the new editor on a separate site with duplicated content. Our internal user experience team is testing as well and we encourage you to play with it until it breaks. Then tell us about it at webservices@csumb.edu

We will also hold presentations at upcoming Technology Open Labs starting May 5 and running through May 19. Each lab will hold a presentation at …

Coming on Monday, May 22, when we go live with the new editor , you will see a new editing block called “clipping.”

You will be able to clip individual blocks on a page and insert them into your own page. This allows you to publish content that belongs to someone else, and when they update it, the content updates on your page as well.

Screenshots
To start clipping start by adding the clipping block to the page where you want the content of another page.

After adding the clipping block, begin clipping by clicking the begin clipping button.

After clicking "Begin clipping" you will now be in clipping mode. You can navigate to the page with the content you want to clip by using the site's navigation or if you already know the URL you can enter the full URL.

When you are on the page you clip by clicking the "clip part of this page" button to be able to select the blocks you want to clip from the page.